| | Ender's Game, originally published in 1985, is only slightly younger than me, so I'm clearly demonstrating how edgy and current I am. Sadly, the underlying message about war is just as relevant today, and possibly even more so. Here's the gist: Humanity has just started to establish a gentle foothold beyond Earth and we've already found an enemy. An insect-like race, colloquially known as buggers, responds to its first accidental contact with humanity with horrifically efficient destruction. The humans' International Fleet only survives by the desperate, hail-mary tactics of one commander Mazer Rackham. The IF is fearful of another attack and is planning a preemptive strike on the bugger homeworld.
This leads to 6-year-old Ender Wiggin. Genetically engineered to be hyper-intelligent, Ender is his parents' third attempt to raise a military genius. His oldest brother Peter failed the IF's rigorous screening process by being far too sadistic (he tortures small animals out of intellectual curiosity, for instance). For the next attempt, the Wiggins chose to have a girl, who they name Valentine, in the hopes that she will be a kinder/gentler version of her brother. She also flunks out, due to her unfortunate tendency to be genuinely nice to people. The IF then makes the bold move of allowing the Wiggins to be exempt from the two-child limit in order to conceive Andrew, who takes the nickname Ender. He surpasses the military's wildest expectations in both intelligence and emotional character and, at age 6, is "asked" to enroll in Battle School, the IF's orbital officers' academy that turns super-kids into Earth's finest.
He really isn't given much choice. It was basically, "It's entirely your decision, but if you don't, all of humanity will be wiped out by giant ants." In Battle School, the IF administration does everything possible to stack the deck against Ender short of openly shooting him in the face. They isolate him from his peers by showering him with undue (for the time) praise and make him survive it all alone, even when his life is threatened. So begins the crushingly depressing aspects of Ender's Game. Despite their MENSA-worthy IQs and emotional development, the students at Battle School and the Wiggin siblings back on Earth are children, 6 is the standard age of all new recruits. Children dealing with the whole spectrum of wartime pressures that would break any adult. But they manage to cope as well, or even better than, some grown soldiers today. Despite the pervading feeling of helplessness, I found myself unable put the book away. Writer Orson Scott Card manages to create real characters that a reader can relate to and root for, inspite of their bad choices, and sometimes because of them. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to reveal that Ender excels in Battle School (owing almost entirely to his talent for thinking three-dimensionally in the school's zero-g mock battles) and goes on to defeat the buggers, but I won't tell you how he does it. That little twist left my jaw in my lap.
The aftermath of the war leaves Ender wracked with guilt and his quest for atonement is just beginning on the last page. His worst fear is that the IF's molding of him into the perfect general has turned him into a psychopath like his brother Peter. In some ways, it has. But was there in other way? Could the war have been avoided? I don't know. Another point that dropkicked my cortex was when one of Ender's fellow recruits suggests that the buggers aren't even a threat and the IF is just going through the motions to keep the public afraid and themselves in power. Sound familiar? That theory is never explored enough to confirm or deny it.
My final verdict is that any sci-fi or war story fan SHOULD read Ender's Game. It's somewhat depressing and Card makes some disturbing choices; Peter is truly a serial killer or global despot in the making, Ender's relationship with his sister Valentine toys with incest, and one of the climactic scenes features two boys fighting naked in the shower. It gave me the Wiggins (sorry, I couldn't resist), but that doesn't diminish the fact that this is a war novel that transcends the categories of pro-war or anti-war and asks why and how we make soldiers.
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| | Posted 7/6/2008 12:14 PM - 280 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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